Where They Found Her: A Novel

by Kimberly McCreight

  “Want one?” someone asked.

  When Sandy looked up, there was a kid about her age with messy blond hair, some freckles across his nose, and perfect teeth. He wasn’t Sandy’s type—too pretty. But he was cute, there was no getting around it. He knew it, too, which, annoyingly, made him cuter.

  He was holding a cigarette out toward Sandy, a lit one in his other hand. “You look like you could use one.”

  Sandy looked around before she reached over and took it. What could they do, kick her out? Technically, she wasn’t even in school. She leaned forward and lit it on the Zippo he’d flipped open, the kerosene bringing back unwanted memories of one of Jenna’s old boyfriends. Sandy took a deep drag and felt her body steady on the exhale.

  “I’m Aidan,” the kid had said. She could feel him staring at the side of her face. Boys like him were always drawn to her: the slutty bad-news girl. The one who pissed off their moms. Sometimes that was fine. And sometimes it was annoying as shit. “I’m new here.”

  Sandy took another drag. She should go, get away from this kid. Get home to Jenna. Sandy knew that. So why hadn’t she moved off the wall? “Cool,” she said.

  The kid had smiled, a troublemaker’s gleam in his eye as he stepped closer to her. Close enough for Sandy to smell his shampoo or his cologne—something spicy and clean. Expensive. “You going to tell me your name?” he’d asked.

  “Not yet,” Sandy had said, pushing herself up. Because she needed to get home before Jenna’s texts took their usual dark turn. And Sandy had known better than to want this kid, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t leave him wanting more. “But thanks for the cigarette.”

  Now Sandy looked around Jenna’s empty bedroom, then went back out to the living room. She thought about texting Jenna a WTF about the rent. But Jenna would never come home if she thought she was in trouble. Helloo??? Sandy texted her instead. A second later, the phone vibrated in her hand. “About fucking time,” she muttered.

  But the text wasn’t from Jenna. It was from Hannah. For the three hundredth fucking time. Sandy wondered if Hannah ever pulled this stalker shit with guys, because it must get her ass blocked immediately. Sandy would have blocked Hannah, too, if she could have. It was too much of a risk, though. Who would Hannah text instead? And what would she tell them when she did?

  Are you okay? Hannah’s text read, like pretty much all of the other ones in the past week and a half.

  Yeah. I’m good. You don’t have to keep asking.

  I’m just worried about you.

  Nothing Sandy wrote back would make a difference. They’d been up and down this road a bunch of times. No matter what Sandy said, Hannah would send another text in a couple hours, asking the exact same thing. And it would go on and on and on until—what? Because there had to be an end to a thing like this. But as much as Sandy wanted Hannah’s texts to stop, she was afraid of what it would mean once they did.

  ???? Sandy wrote to Jenna again, ignoring Hannah. If Jenna was passed out somewhere, sleeping it off, there was a chance that the noise from another text might wake her ????????? Hello???

  Sandy looked around the filthy apartment. Their best option would be to walk out the door. Leave all their shit behind like the garbage it was. Except if they didn’t have the money for rent, they sure as hell wouldn’t have the money for new just-as-shitty shit. Wherever they went, they’d have to find new jobs, and that could take time.

  That would be Jenna’s best argument for staying in Ridgedale—and she would try to keep them there, for sure—that they both already had decent jobs. That wouldn’t be why she really wanted to stay, but it was a much better story than the truth.

  Where are you? Sandy typed to Jenna one last time.

  She waited a minute more. Still nothing. Then she tried to call. An actual phone call was the official “911 I need you to save my ass now.” Jenna’s phone rang four times before going to voicemail. It was on, at least. That was something. And there was Jenna’s smoky drawl on the greeting, the one she meant to be sexy. And it was. “I’m not here. You know what to do. Bye-bye.”

  “Where the hell are you? I’ve sent a million texts,” Sandy said, trying to sound more worried than pissed off. “I need to talk to you. It’s kind of— No, it is. It’s an emergency. Call me back as soon as you can. Okay, Mom?”

  The word “mom” felt swollen in Sandy’s mouth and made of something hard. Her lips had to stretch to fit around it. It had been so long since she’d called Jenna that, longer still since it had meant anything. It was a shot in the dark, a grab at something totally out of reach. But there had to be a chance it would land. That it would settle inside Jenna and wake up some long-dead thing. That it would make her pick up the goddamn phone.

  But what if it didn’t? Sandy shook her head, tried to push away the thought. In her world, what-ifs were never fucking helpful. She had to focus. She had to get her stash of money and get the hell out of there and try to find Jenna. That was the only option. Because as much as she might like to pretend she’d leave town without her, Sandy couldn’t. She’d never leave Jenna behind.

  Sandy knelt on the couch and reached around the back, sliding her hand into the gap where she kept the thin box. She stretched farther when she didn’t feel it. Her heart sped up as she kept rooting around. It had been a few days since she’d checked, but it had to be back there. Where else would it be?

  Finally, Sandy’s nails scratched against the cardboard. The box had gotten wedged farther away, that was all. But as soon as she yanked it out and reached in she could tell something was wrong. The envelope inside was too thin. Sandy’s hands were trembling as she pulled out a short stack of one-dollar bills. She fanned them out: twenty-six in all.

  Nine hundred and seventy-four dollars less than there was supposed to be.

  MOLLY

  MARCH 5, 2013

  Dr. Zomer. Sounds like a cross between a serial killer and an antidepressant. I’m glad she waited to bring up journaling, because I was barely on board with therapy to begin with. But that’s not because of her. I like Dr. Zomer, with her huge brown eyes and warm, wrinkly face. She’s nice and I can tell she wants to help.

  But wait. I’m not supposed to be writing about Dr. Zomer in here. I’m supposed to be writing about me.

  I think it makes Justin happy that I’m seeing Dr. Zomer. Just this morning he said that I seem more like myself. But sometimes I wonder if that person exists anymore.

  Look, now I’m writing about Justin. Me. Me. Me.

  Oh yeah, I didn’t cry today! I never let myself cry in front of Ella—wait, that’s such a lie. Why am I bothering to lie HERE? No one’s going to read this.

  For WEEKS after I lost the baby, I cried my face off right in front of Ella. Cried so much, I’m surprised she didn’t wash away in a river of my selfish tears. But after Justin went back to work, I did keep my crying contained to when Ella was in day care, from nine to five. And then today, not a single tear.

  Until right now. Because now I’m getting teary because I feel guilty that I didn’t cry. God, sometimes I really do hate myself.

  Well, look at that, Dr. Zomer. A whole page filled that you’ll never read—no one will, so I don’t understand the point. But it’s filled all the same. Because that’s what you asked me to do. And I’m trying to do the right thing here. I’m trying as hard as I can.

  Molly

  After fifteen minutes of erratic driving and careful square breathing, I reached the outskirts of Ridgedale and the lovely stretch of shops that included the Ridgedale Reader offices. The parking lot was nearly empty as I pulled in, the stores—the Knit Wit knitting shop, Ridgedale Antiques, and the Peter Naftali Gallery—starting to open for the day. I was parking when my phone buzzed with a text.

  Tell me you have purple sweatpants? It was Stella. Her son Will was a plum in The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

  Shit. Ella’s leaf-green clothes I’d even bought special lime-colored leggings for the occasion. I tapped Stella’s message cl
osed and wrote one to Justin. Bring green clothes. On counter!! xoxo

  My phone vibrated right back in my hand, startling me. On it!

  There was a picture, too. A selfie of Justin and Ella, already in her green outfit, flashing a thumbs-up and a huge beaming grin. I shouldn’t have underestimated Justin. Sometimes I forgot how much he’d taken care of Ella by himself in the past two years.

  After I lost the baby, Justin had taken a month’s leave from his adjunct position at Columbia. His mother also came for the first couple of weeks to help. And thank God, because in those early days, Justin had to focus on holding me as I cried and cried. Once Justin’s mother was gone and I was a bit better, he took over Ella’s care. Despite never having been much of a hands-on dad before, with ease and not a single complaint, Justin brushed Ella’s hair and cuddled with her and gave her long, silly baths. He paid all the bills, dealt with our car being towed, did endless laundry, and cooked all our meals as though the key to our survival lay in his successful completion of household chores. In between, he kept on holding me as much as he could. He didn’t go back to work until he was sure I’d be okay getting myself and Ella through the day. I did get there by week six, but I couldn’t possibly have returned to work at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. No matter how much I had loved that job, I could never again have spent all day talking about pregnancy.

  I closed Justin’s message and returned to Stella’s No purple sweats. Sorry! I wrote back.

  Shit. I totally forgot.

  Me too.

  It was typical of Stella to forget the sweatpants—she always forgot things—and to think that someone else might have some lying around. Luckily, she didn’t wear her maternal shortcomings like a badge of honor. Growing up as I had, I was always irked by that. But Stella wasn’t embarrassed by her imperfections either. A gorgeous former stockbroker five years my senior but who looked much younger, Stella hadn’t returned to work after the Lehman crash had left her unemployed. Instead, she’d gotten pregnant with her son Will, now five. Her older son, Aidan, was a junior in high school.

  Shortly before Will was born, Stella’s husband, Kevin, had dropped thirty pounds, rented a glossy pied-à-terre in Chelsea, and found a twenty-seven-year-old yoga instructor for a girlfriend. Stella and Kevin had divorced not long after, when Will was six months old. According to Stella, Kevin had wanted out so badly that he’d acceded to even her most absurd financial demands. He was on his third girlfriend—Zumba this time—and visiting the boys only on occasional weekends.

  Maybe that was why Aidan was struggling so much. Recently kicked out of St. Paul’s, the area’s most prestigious private school, he’d quickly found trouble at Ridgedale High School. He’d been suspended twice already. Still, I liked Aidan, probably because he shared Stella’s outsize spirit and take-no-bullshit bluntness.

  Fuck. Will is going to kill me.

  My phone rang then, startling me. Erik Schinazy.

  “I was about to call you,” I lied. It was amazing how calm and authoritative I sounded, especially considering how I’d rushed away from the creek in a panic. “I’m just stepping into the office now.”

  “Didn’t mean to jump on you, but I’ll be unreachable for a bit,” Erik said in a way that begged for me to ask why. “Wanted to touch base before I left.”

  I unlocked the door to the office, balancing the phone to my ear. It was dark inside except for Erik’s office light, left on in the back as though he’d dashed out in the middle of the night. Everyone besides Erik sat in the central open-plan space, where four desks were arranged in a square—one for each of the three of us on staff and an extra for a fourth writer, gone since the advent of the Internet. I headed for my pristine desk, which looked pathetically unbroken in, compared to Elizabeth and Richard’s stacks of research files, tacked-up notes, and piles of printouts.

  “Well, there is a body,” I began as I dropped my things on my desk. I sucked in some air. Time to say it out loud without my voice catching. “And it’s a baby.”

  “Shit,” Erik said quietly. He sounded genuinely troubled. “My source didn’t say anything about a— That would have been— Obviously, I would have—”

  “I don’t have any more details yet, apart from the baby being female,” I said, trying to get past Erik’s fumbling to be kind without admitting what he knew about me and my lost baby. “But I agreed to wait a few hours before running that it’s a baby. Technically, I overheard that part.”

  “Overheard?” He did not sound pleased. “What does that mean?”

  And here I’d been thinking the “overheard” part would make me seem resourceful. But it did sound vaguely sleazy now that I’d said it out loud.

  “I happened to be standing with Steve Carlson, the chief of police, when an officer on his radio mentioned a baby,” I went on. Because it hadn’t been inappropriate, it was fortuitous. “He offered me an exclusive interview in exchange for holding off on disclosing that detail. I’m supposed to meet with him again at ten a.m. In the meantime, Steve’s fine with us running a basic story about the body.”

  “Oh, Steve’s fine with it, is he?” Erik asked sharply. “You do realize we don’t work for Ridgedale’s chief of police. We decide what we report on, not Steve.”

  “Right.” My cheeks felt hot. I was glad Erik was on the phone so he couldn’t see how embarrassed I was. “I suppose I was trying, as you suggested, not to alienate him.”

  Erik wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t given much thought to my obligations as a journalist. Largely because I hadn’t given much thought to myself as a journalist.

  “Just remember with something like this, everyone you talk to is going to have an angle—police, parents, university officials. Anything they tell you willingly is going to be in support of a self-serving narrative. That’s not because they’re bad people. It’s human nature. And it’s your job as a journalist to weave these biased threads into some semblance of the truth.”

  It sounded so noble. The truth: I wanted to be a part of that. A part of finding out what had happened to the baby and making sense of it for people.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Listen, it isn’t fair, dumping you into this with hardly any guidance. Do you want me to put a call in to Richard? See if he can handle some of this from home?”

  I felt a wave of panic. I did not want the story being taken away from me. That couldn’t happen. “No,” I said, and perhaps too vehemently. “I can absolutely handle it. I want to.”

  “Good, then.” Luckily, Erik sounded impressed instead of troubled. “And, Molly, I know better than anyone what it’s like to try to reinvent yourself. Hang in there. You know, one day at a time.”

  “Thank you. That’s good advice.” It was, and so why did it make me feel so ashamed?

  “We’ll go with your basic announcement online for now and include an update after your exclusive. That’ll be fine,” he said, and more gentle than I’d ever heard him sound. “As soon as you have that first piece, email it to me. I’ll post it right away.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. Then I waited for him to close off the conversation. But there was only a long silence, followed by some odd rustling. I wondered whether he had dropped the phone or forgotten I was still there. “Hello?” I asked.

  “Yep, I’m here,” he said abruptly, as if trying to hide whatever he was doing on the other end. Was someone there with him? I hoped not a woman or a purveyor of liquor. What kind of emergency was this? “I’ll brainstorm some questions for Steve and send them your way. Use them or not, it’s your story. But I’ve found with high-stakes interviews, it helps to have twice as many questions as you’ll need.”

  “Yes, any suggestions would be great.”

  “No problem,” Erik said. “Believe it or not, I do remember what it was like starting out in this game. It’s a steep learning curve, but it’s mercifully short.”

  After I’d written a quick piece for online posting—two s
entences about the body; there was virtually nothing to say—I had enough time before my meeting with Steve to do a little online research into crime rates in Ridgedale, background for the longer print article I was formulating in my head.

  I was surprised by the amount of minor crime in Ridgedale—simple assaults, automobile thefts, robberies—but there had been only two murders in the past twenty years. Esther Gleason had shot her elderly husband in apparent self-defense, and an ex-convict from Staten Island had been killed in an off-campus student apartment, a Ritalin deal gone wrong. It was in reading about the second case that I came across the mention of another death, this one accidental, near the Essex Bridge.

  Simon Barton was a high school student who’d died when he tripped and fell during a high school graduation party just south of the Essex Bridge. Now there were four dead bodies in twenty years, and half of them had been found in the same spot? Simon Barton, I wrote at the top of my pad.

  My phone buzzed with a text. Package delivered, Justin had written. She’s more than fine, I promise. Now get back to work.

  I was looking at my phone when the door to the office swung open. When I looked up, Stella was standing in the doorway in a short white tennis skirt and matching fitted sweatshirt. Her dark brown hair was in a high ponytail, and her regal face—strong jaw, long elegant nose—looked beautiful, as usual.

  Stella strode into the office, pausing to eye the darkness. She stepped back toward the panel of switches for the overhead lights, flicking them on all at once with a hard swipe of her palm. “Why the hell are you sitting here in the dark?”

  Stella was more flamboyant than my friends typically were, but she was exactly what I needed these days: someone to forcibly drag me out when I said I’d rather stay home, someone to make me talk when I was convinced I couldn’t breathe a word. We’d known each other since Justin and I had moved to Ridgedale in August, not even a year. But it felt like we’d been friends much longer.